Nvidia disables overclocking, says it's for your own good

Gamers ticked off with surprise 'feature'

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Sorry, owners of GTX 900M GPU-series notebooks: Nvidia has taken away the ability for you to overclock its beefy mobile graphics cards, and it's apparently for your own good.

According to a post by a customer care representative on Nvidia's forum, it was only possible to overclock (and underclock) the GPU prior to the release of GeForce R347 (version 347.29) because of a bug that crept into a previous driver. Nvidia says that it removed the ability to prevent users from turning their portable gaming tanks into expensive plastic bricks.

It read: "Unfortunately GeForce notebooks were not designed to support overclocking. Overclocking is by no means a trivial feature, and depends on thoughtful design of thermal, electrical, and other considerations. By overclocking a notebook, a user risks serious damage to the system that could result in non-functional systems, reduced notebook life, or many other effects.

"There was a bug introduced into our drivers which enabled some systems to overclock. This was fixed in a recent update. Our intent was not to remove features from GeForce notebooks, but rather to safeguard systems from operating outside design limits."

Frame hate

The post has generated eight pages of colourful commentary from disgruntled gamers keen to eke out maximum performance from their investment.

Thankfully, it's still possible to roll back to an older driver to regain overclocking functionality. It will be interesting to see if Nvidia re-introduces it in its next driver release, which doesn't seem too likely as things stand.